A 116-year-old independent bookstore in Seattle is feeling the threat from Amazon. But this time the risk comes not from the online behemoth – but the physical bookstore that the company opened just two months ago.

Amazon Books, a brick and mortar shop in an upscale mall in Seattle, is a looming presence to the remaining independents that Amazon.com has yet to take down.

“People are going to think I’m Chicken Little,” says Pam Cady, the manager of general books at Seattle’s 116-year-old University Book Store, “but the sky is falling.”

For the city in the belly of the Amazon.com beast, Seattle has a surprising number of independent bookstores.

From Capitol Hill’s Elliott Bay Book Company, to the University of Washington’s University Book Store, to the Queen Anne neighborhood’s Queen Anne Book Company, brick and mortar bookstores have – so far – survived and even thrived in the city that launched the company that killed a thousand bookstores.

“This is a neighborhood where people live and want to support a bookstore,” says Tracy Taylor, general manager of the Elliott Bay bookstore. Many of her customers work for Amazon, she says, which actually helps since they care about books.

But Cady tells a different story. “Everyone’s had to adjust to Amazon online,” she says, , “but having a store just down the street is a little different. We’re at ground zero. We’re in the blast.” University Book Store is less than a mile away from Amazon Books.

Cady wouldn’t provide specific numbers on how Amazon Books has affected University Book Store’s sales, but she says that she’s definitely noticed “different spending patterns”.

“It scares me what could happen not just to us, but to everyone,” Cady said.

A safe distance away from Amazon Books – about 15 minutes by car – Elliot Bay Book Company remains a protected oasis from the Amazon store’s influence. The spacious store in the city’s cultured Capitol Hill neighborhood feels like the opposite of Amazon Books. At Amazon, kids play with Amazon Fire on a giant flatscreen; at Elliott Bay, kids play inside a miniature castle in the middle of the children’s section. Each book at Amazon features a label with an excerpt from a customer review and the aggregate customer rating from the website; at Elliott Bay, select books have handwritten recommendations from staff.

Taylor hasn’t noticed any impact on Elliott Bay’s sales since the Amazon store opened, but she says “the jury is still out” given the company’s “unlimited resources” and penchant for secrecy.

“Are they going to open more locations near independent bookstores?” she asks, citing the troubles at University Book Store. “We’re definitely nervous.”

Amazon Books is not your average bookstore. Taylor, who visited soon after it opened, described the store as “sterile” and “not what we think of as a normal bookstore”.

“It’s like a cross between a Microsoft Store and an airport bookstore,” she said.

Aidan Devlon, 32, of Seattle, looks up a book on the Amazon smartphone app as he shops in the new Amazon Books store in Seattle. Photograph: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images

Indeed, the selection (or lack of selection at Amazon Books) is one of the most puzzling things about it. For the company that expanded the concept of a bookstore to include every title imaginable available at the click of a mouse, Amazon’s experiment in IRL-bookselling is an exercise in contraction, with only about 5,000 titles available.

You can’t buy a Bible at the Amazon bookstore. Despite its status as the bestselling nonfiction book of all time, the good book is nowhere to be found (though you can pick up a copy of The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages with an introduction by Adam Gopnik).

You also can’t buy a thesaurus, Pride and Prejudice, or the first three volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book Four is on the shelf, however, for all you Knausshounds).

The experience of browsing at Amazon Books is continually perplexing.

Why are there more titles by Elin Hilderbrand (four) than Toni Morrison (one)?

“If you allow a store that only has 5,000 titles, you’re losing out on 145,000 other titles,” Cady says. “It shrinks everything. It shrinks the culture. People are so concerned about what things cost, they’re not thinking about the real cost.”

Still, during a recent visit, Amazon Books was bustling with customers, and not just the “showrooming” kind that browse in a physical store and buy online. With guaranteed Amazon.com prices, people were actually buying books in the Amazon bookstore.

Amazon boldly goes where no internet bookseller has gone before: the real world

Read more

Cady calls it “a bookstore for people who don’t care about being in a real bookstore”, adding: “All they sell is the low-hanging fruit.”

And that’s what’s scaring her. Because making money from “low-hanging fruit” – the Hilderbrand beach reads, the latest Pulitzer prize winner, all those adult coloring books – is what enables University Book Store to carry the kind of extensive back stock that makes a neighborhood bookstore a community resource as well as retailer.

Deborah Bass, a spokesperson for Amazon, defended the store’s selection, noting that store customers can access Amazon.com’s entire catalogue from their mobile phones. “There are limitations to every physical space,” Bass said.